Kukla's Korner Hockey

Entries with the tag: craig berube

Asked whether he deserved another chance to coach next year, Berube laughed.

“When you don’t make the playoffs, anything can happen,” Berube replied. “Especially here. We’re still fighting to make the playoffs. If that happens, who knows what can happen. It’s an organization that has a lot of pride. They want to be in the fight every year.”

The Flyers' "tragic number" is now five. Five points earned by Ottawa — the current second wild card — or five points lost by the Flyers eliminates the Flyers from the playoff hunt.

There might not be any bigger fan of Eagles coach Chip Kelly than embattled Flyers coach Craig Berube. With all of the moves Kelly has made recently, Berube has enjoyed convenient cover for a series of missteps that should cost him his job.

After Saturday's game in Edmonton, the Flyers are eight games from a season that will end without a playoff berth for only the third time in 19 seasons. Since 16 of the 30 teams in the NHL make the playoffs, it requires some effort to join the 47 percent that will be making tee times starting April 12, the day after the regular season ends.

Certainly, Berube has a co-conspirator in Paul Holmgren, the former general manager who left the coach with an ill-fitting roster. A defensive corps comprised mostly of second-pairing (at best) talent and a huge lack of secondary scoring hindered the team all season.

Also, the huge contracts and minuscule production from washed-out veterans Vinny Lecavalier and R.J. Umberger will continue to be a problem because their outsize deals will prevent any sort of trade.

What should get Berube canned, however, is his puzzling mistreatment of goalie Steve Mason, who has become the team's most indispensable player.

The Flyers are broken, and it would be surprising if another coach isn't hired to try to put them back together.

Coach Craig Berube is a good hockey man with strong principles, but he has lost this flawed team. Many of the players are upset with how Berube singled out goalie Steve Mason - three times - in the team's eighth straight road loss Thursday, a 4-1 defeat in Calgary....

When you combine the Flyers' repeated failures with the growing tension in the locker room, it's fair to wonder if first-year general manager Ron Hextall will soon make a coaching change.

So where do the Flyers go from here, and does coach Craig Berube have 15 games left in his tenure?

Barring a miracle, the Flyers will miss the playoffs for the second time in three seasons. They have regressed in their second year under Berube, who is not the most beloved figure in the locker room.

Respected, yes. Beloved, no.

Some of the defensemen are still perturbed at the Blue Line Carousel that has had players yanked in and out of the lineup. Vinny Lecavalier, a center primarily used as a fourth-line right winger when he wasn't a healthy scratch, is fuming at the way he has been handled, and it's fair to wonder why he wasn't given a shot at being the second-line center for a few weeks to try to get him on track.

After Berube replaced the fired Peter Laviolette early last season, the Flyers went 42-27-10 under the new coach's defense-first style, reached the playoffs, and took the eventual Stanley Cup finalist New York Rangers to seven games in the opening round.

This year, the Flyers are 28-26-13, and the biggest indictment of Berube is this: With a playoff spot in sight, the Flyers have lost their last five games against teams that are not in playoff positions: Columbus, Buffalo, Carolina, Toronto, and New Jersey.

The Ottawa Sun's Bruce Garrioch has made a helluva case for Antoine Vermette as the league's most useful player available at the trade deadline (in no small part because the Arizona Coyotes forward used to be a Senator), and Vermette's far from chopped liver, but these parts of his Sunday rumor column are more interesting than Vermette talk or discussion of Team Canada WJC coach Benoit Groulx's future:

Montreal GM Marc Bergevin has been working the phones to try to get help up front. Yes, the Habs have had a great first half, but they'd still like to get a little more size among their forwards for a long playoff run. They waived blue-liner Bryan Allen and his $3.5-million contract. He was sent to the club's AHL affiliate in Hamilton and the Habs are hopeful someone will deal for him ... If a team is looking for experience, a possible option is Colorado C Daniel Briere. A UFA with a $4-million cap hit, he's being used in a fourth-line role by the Avs. Briere, 36, could be a nice fit for a team in the East and the Avs wouldn't want much more than a draft pick in return. The Islanders could use a guy like Briere. They have little experience ... A possible fit for the Wings: Oilers' D Jeff Petry. Detroit GM Ken Holland was on Edmonton radio last week and indicated he needs a right shot. Petry is a UFA and a Michigan native.

Ryan Kesler's also from Michigan, and the Wings were supposedly in trade talks for him, too, but that didn't happen. A player's Michigan ties haven't fared into the Wings,' "We want to trade for guy over the other one" decision-making process since the Jimmy Carson trade.

Flyers GM Ron Hextall is getting antsy to make deals. Philly has virtually no shot at making the playoffs, coach Craig Berube is on the hot-seat and Hextall wouldn't mind clearing out cash. While the Flyers would like to move blue-liners Nick Schultz, Carlo Colaiacovo and Michael Del Zotto, the guy teams really covet is Braydon Coburn. With a $4.5-million cap hit through 2016-17, Coburn is highly regarded and could bring a good return. There's also interest in centre Brayden Schenn, who has a cap hit of $2.75 million through next season.

"The next 20 games mean a lot,'' said R.J. Umberger, whose third-period goal tied a game that appeared to once again be slipping from the Flyers' shaky grasp. "We're not going to quit. We're going to take advantage of this stretch of home games and be a better road team down the stretch here. A lot can happen in the second half of the year.''

And a lot must. To have even half a chance to make the playoffs, the Flyers would need points in 30 of their remaining 41 games and would need to win 24 of them, according to SportsClubStats.com. Stated more starkly, a 23-14-4 record the rest of the way would give the Flyers just a 0.4 chance of making the postseason.

Can you say, "Snowball in H-E-Double-hockey-sticks?"

Berube preaches a one-game-at-a-time approach, but the locker-room vocabulary now regularly includes phrases like "streak," "run" and even "games." Beating Boston would shrink the margin between the teams to seven, losing would increase it to double digits, but this half-done, half-empty season is way more complicated than that. There are too many games and too many teams to play one-on-one, and so the focus remains an internal one....

Fire the coach, right? Instead, Hextall, amid threats that changes will be made if the team does not perform better, continually gives Berube a vote of confidence.

This does not mean he sees Berube as his coach in the future. Contrary to a popular outcry, the Flyers don't always try to solve their issues from within, as Ken Hitchcock and Peter Laviolette demonstrate. But they almost always try to fix them that way.

“He’s gotta go out and play his game. Don’t try and do too much, just play your game. Just be you. Move the puck when you get it. Get out and play the puck and move it. That’s what gets him in the game. And make the saves you’re supposed to make.”

-Craig Berube, head coach of the Philadelphia Flyers on goaltender Steve Mason who has yet to win a game this season. More on Mason from Tim Panaccio of CSNPhilly.

Ted Nolan will likely be getting a three-year contract from the Buffalo Sabres when they return from their Western Conference road swing, which earns a two-thumbs up from Drew Stafford. “He’s a great motivator; he’s extremely simple on his philosophies,” said Stafford, who has been in Buffalo for eight seasons. “He tells us, ‘Look what you get to do for a living … it’s a special opportunity, don’t take it for granted. Show up and compete for a couple of hours.”

Their ancestors helped develop the game centuries ago. There have been Indians in the NHL for 60 years.

But not until today will two Natives meet as head coaches in the NHL.

They are First Nations men, to be precise; that is the correct nomenclature in Canada. Sabres coach Ted Nolan is an Ojibwe from Ontario. Flyers coach Craig Berube is part Cree, and from Alberta.

"It's huge," Nolan said upon his arrival in Philadelphia yesterday. "The significance of it is not really what it means to me, or Craig Berube, but what it means when you think of what our ancestors went through."

I never fought when I played goal, and I'd delicately describe the practice as "dumb" in the modern-day NHL, so you'd be correct to suggest that I thought Ray Emery's scrap with Braden Holtby was idiotic, and that the combination of injuries sustained during the Caps-Flyers brawl and the lack of supplemental discipline for Emery because there are apparently "no rules" prohibiting one goalie from skating to the other end of the ice and choosing to lay a beating upon another goalie all yielded a lack of team discipline and a lack of responsiblity-taking on the part of the NHL.

The New York Post's Larry Brooks' Sunday column includes a pondering about the Vanek-Moulson trade, a note about the Oilers' goaltending, suspension talk and much more, but his main thrust involves the Flyers-Capitals brawl and Emery's conduct, with Brooks suggesting that the Flyers' lack of discipline can be traced down from its ownership to the GM coach and players:

Already whistled for one roughing infraction and about to enter the penalty box early in the third period, Rosehill instead spun around and skated across the ice on a search-and-destroy mission. He inserted himself into a skirmish, knocking down Panthers forward Tomas Kopecky, earning another roughing penalty and a 10-minute misconduct and leaving the Flyers shorthanded for four minutes....

"Well, I thought it was a weak call originally," Berube said. "And then what he did afterward was unacceptable. He can't do it. He knows that."

Craig Berube is in as the Philadelphia Flyers’ new coach, replacing Peter Laviolette three games – three! - into the new 2013-14 NHL season. It felt like a panic move, which is what a lot of moves the Flyers make these days feel like.

They can be bold – trading away Jeff Carter and Mike Richards on the same day – and occasionally puzzling – signing Ilya Bryzgalov to a monster free-agent contract, acquiring Steve Mason from the Columbus scrap heap – but they are always interesting. Philadelphia has money to spend and an intensely loyal and involved owner in Ed Snider, so emotion figures into the equation more in Philadelphia than almost anywhere else in the NHL.

There is a Flyer way of doing things and Berube epitomizes the Flyer way. As a player, he was immensely popular wherever he landed – and the same apparently has been true in his various coaching assignments up to now....